The Stage

Comedy’s geek god - Graham Linehan and The IT Crowd

Published Thursday 2 February 2006 at 11:45 by Maria Esposito

Writer Graham Linehan’s latest project, computer comedy The IT Crowd, promises to do for techies what Father Ted did for the priesthood when he co-created it aged 25. But, he tells Maria Esposito, it is all affectionate since the nerdy central characters are based on his life before marriage

Writer Graham Linehan is the common, if somewhat unlikely, link between rural priests, dipsomaniac booksellers and IT geeks.

After penning cult Channel 4 sitcoms Father Ted and Black Books, Linehan has tried to find comedy in technology for his latest project, The IT Crowd. Although there is plenty of comedy mileage in computer nerds, he initially decided to draw on much broader horizons for the series.

“It was originally set in a travel agent, and I had one joke to do with being a travel agent,” says Linehan. “He is on the phone to someone and he says ‘No, no I wouldn’t go to France, France is very rude at this time of year’. That was really as good as it got.”

Sensing the shortcomings of this environment, he quickly changed his focus to IT. “I didn’t want to do any more research because it bored the hell out of me,” he says honestly. “So I decided to turn it into something I was interested in, which was technology.”

Linehan also drew on a chance encounter with an IT professional who came to fix his faulty computer. “I was sitting beside this guy at the computer and we had this two-hour conversation,” says the Dublin-born writer, who created Father Ted with writing partner Arthur Mathews at the precocious age of 25. “I found it really difficult to understand him and it was clear he was frustrated by how little I understood of what he was saying to me. The mix of the two incidents made The IT Crowd.”

The resulting six-part sitcom centres on the lowly IT department of a successful London company. The series opens as glamorous new employee Jen (Katherine Parkinson) is assigned to manage the two-man IT team, consisting of Roy (Chris O’Dowd, who appeared in last year’s comedy film Festival) and Moss (Richard Ayoade, co-writer of award-winning comedy Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace). Jen is immediately shunted into a dingy, windowless basement with a pair of archetypal IT geeks who know their way round a motherboard but have no idea about women.

Linehan deliberately used Jen’s descent into career hell to highlight the upstairs/downstairs mentality that prevails in many companies. “Putting them in the basement was a visual device to show that they’re the bottom of the heap,” he says. “I’ll always side with the bullied and the repressed.”

As well as championing the underdog, he has strictly personal reasons for siding with the socially inept characters of Roy and Moss. “I want to show them sympathetically because basically Roy and Moss are me,” he admits. “Roy is certainly me before I got married. Moss is me maybe when I was about 16. I imagine them to have grown up reading sci-fi, not liking football, being bullied and not having very good social skills. Really it was a sneaky way of writing about myself without being embarrassingly biographical.”

With such as strong connection to Roy, Linehan even considered playing the character himself but is grateful the part eventually went to another Irishman instead. Despite appearing in comedies such as The Day Today, I’m Alan Partridge and Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, he was happy to stick to writing and directing The IT Crowd and believes that his default position will always be behind the camera. “I couldn’t make a career as an actor because the quality of the scripts is generally so weak that I’d just spend my entire life depressed, which I’m sure a lot of actors do.”

He also hopes his tried and tested comedy conceit in The IT Crowd will keep the lead trio off the Prozac. “The three people together, especially the two guys and a girl, is a pretty powerful set-up,” he says, having used the same premise in both Father Ted and Black Books. “You could possibly transfer everyone from Seinfeld onto the show. It’s the right amount of people for a sitcom.”

Linehan happily admits that Seinfeld’s brand of New York Jewish humour has had a major impact on his work. “I’m very interested in the mechanics of script writing and Seinfeld seems to be, on a structural level, the best written sitcom ever,” he says. “And I’ve always been a huge Woody Allen fan. When I was a kid, I actually stole a lot of his material to use in debates that I was doing in class.”

In common with seminal US comedies such as Seinfeld and even Friends, The IT Crowd was filmed in front of a live studio audience. While this might fly in the face of contemporary British television comedy, Linehan is happy to buck this trend. “Because of the success of The Office, everyone is now trying to do stuff on location with shaky cameras and naturalistic performances,” he says in earnest, despite working with The Office producer Ash Atalla on The IT Crowd. “People think they’re pushing barriers but they’re forgetting it has to be funny first. There’s nothing wrong with looking up to Dad’s Army.”

His own new series might hark back to classic TV comedies but will the real IT crowd like it? Linehan certainly hopes they will. “It’s done with a lot of affection,” he says, who is busy editing the final episodes. “I think they’ll get that straight away. I certainly never set out to offend anyone in the same way that we never set out to offend any of the clergy in Father Ted. If anything, this is a celebration of IT people. It’s basically Father Ted for geeks.”